Hurricane Filled New York Aquarium With Dangerous Substance: Water

Tanks in the Sea Cliff exhibit at the New York Aquarium were open at the top and vulnerable to the incursion of seawater.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The clock in the office of Jon Forrest Dohlin, director of the New York Aquarium, just off the Boardwalk in Coney Island, is frozen at 7:50. “And 10 seconds,” he added, almost cheerily, as he stood surrounded by boxes of soggy papers and office furniture.

That was the moment on Monday night, last week, that the Atlantic Ocean surged past the Boardwalk and into the six buildings that make up the 14-acre aquarium complex in Brooklyn, and when the power went out. It was also the moment that the radio messages among the nearly 20 staff members who were monitoring the situation suddenly signaled that the aquarium, which is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, was about to face the biggest crisis in its history.

“We went from getting messages saying that the water is not here yet to ‘It’s coming in everywhere,’ ” recalled Mr. Dohlin, who was outside the aquarium when Hurricane Sandy hit. “It went from zero to 60 like that.”

Within three minutes, the water, which had bypassed the sandbagged flood doors and instead entered through vents and ducts, was pouring down the stairs of the buildings, filling their basements with 10 to 15 feet of water. The water kept rising, flooding the ground floors with up to three feet of water. One building, called Sea Cliffs, was a special concern, since it has many tanks and exhibits in its basement, tanks that were open at the top and thus vulnerable to the incursion of seawater.

Perhaps more important for the entire collection of 12,000 fish and marine mammals, the floodwaters immediately knocked out the aquarium’s electrical transformers and damaged its electrical distribution system and mechanical equipment, rendering emergency generators useless. And it ruined the pumps and motors that operate critical life support systems for the fish like oxygenation, filtration and heat.

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Mitik, the baby walrus, didn't mind the storm.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

“It was utterly devastating to see the basement fill up because I know what’s down there,” Mr. Dohlin recalled. “At that point, in my mind, I knew the facility was a total loss.”

It quickly dawned on Mr. Dohlin and other officials that they might need to evacuate the entire collection to other aquariums in the region, something they wanted to avoid. “The animals are already stressed out from what’s going on,” he said, “and shipping them out would only add to that.”

Mr. Dohlin and the staff regrouped on the second floor of the aquarium’s health center, which, because it had a working emergency generator, soon became the storm-recovery command post. But first he waded through two feet of water to a holding area on the health center’s first floor to check on Mitik, the baby walrus who was orphaned in Alaska and had arrived at the aquarium only weeks earlier.

The entire holding area was now awash in ocean water. “There’s Mitik swimming around in the surge and vocalizing like ‘Hey, this is great,’ ” Mr. Dohlin recalled.

In the days that followed, even as staff members realized that some of their own homes had been severely flooded or damaged, Mr. Dohlin and more than a dozen employees worked nearly around the clock to pump water out of the basements and get emergency generators up and running. Consolidated Edison was eager to help, but the broken transformers made it impossible to restore power. Aquariums from Boston to Baltimore were alerted that they might need to take in fish from the collection if those efforts were not successful.

The first priority was to get oxygen in the fish tanks. In anticipation of the storm, the aquarium staff had ordered extra tanks of oxygen, which were placed in the fish tanks and opened slightly to release oxygen, but employees had to continually check the oxygen levels with meters to make sure they were correct. “If the oxygen gets too high, that’s not good either,” Mr. Dohlin said. “There’s a whole series of deleterious effects.”

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In the parking lot of the New York Aquarium on Tuesday, crews cleared sand and debris that Hurricane Sandy had left behind.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

But the filtration and heating systems were dependent on electricity. As the days wore on, the aquarium’s electrical distribution and mechanical systems were repaired; by Friday, the emergency generators were able to power those life supports, averting the need to evacuate. Still, the aquarium is expected to remain closed well into next year. A major new exhibit, called Ocean Wonders: Sharks!, on which construction was about to begin, will still move forward, however.

Soon after the hurricane came ashore, the first and — as it would turn out — only casualties were spotted flopping around in the salty floodwaters. About 150 koi carp were in temporary holding pools outside the aquarium, as their exhibit was being renovated. The surge knocked those pools over, however, and the koi, which are freshwater fish, could not be saved. “It was very sad,” Mr. Dohlin said.

The big question that remained was the fate of the 150 or so fish in more than a dozen exhibits in the basement of Sea Cliffs, from rock fish to seahorses to eels. Not until early Friday morning — 4 a.m. to be exact — was Mr. Dohlin, wearing chest-high waders, finally able to descend the steps with a flashlight to find out. He was expecting the worst, knowing that the ocean water had penetrated the tanks. “I thought we lost everything,” he recalled.

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Instead, “I can see into the tanks and I realize that every single fish is still there and still alive,” he said, walking through the darkened exhibit hall again on Tuesday, when a couple of inches of muddy water still covered the floors. “Our giant lobster was here. The seahorses were still alive. It was amazing.”

Mr. Dohlin speculated that even though the floodwaters had poured into the top of the tanks, the cold ocean water must have sat on top of the tank water, “striated,” as it were. The fish were happy to remain in their own half. With one exception: A staff member found a three-foot-long American eel alive in three inches of water at the bottom of a staff shower stall, after the basement was pumped out.

“It was such an affirmation that maybe miracles do happen,” Mr. Dohlin said. “We immediately named him Lazarus.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2012, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Hurricane Filled New York Aquarium With Dangerous Substance: Water. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe